investigates

It sounds like a fair bit of them are either firing employees or insulting them. I don’t really get the appeal, but I also was pretty oblivious to Donald Trump until his Presidential run, so I assume that there are people out there who enjoy it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_dolls

The doll includes 17 phrases,[6] which Trump recorded.[4][12] The phrases, activated by pressing a button,[14] consist of quotes used by Trump on The Apprentice and in his 2004 book, Trump: How to Get Rich.[3] Phrases include:

• “This one’s easy for me—you’re fired.”
• “I have no choice but to tell you you’re fired.”
• “I should fire myself just for having you around.”
• “You really screwed up!”
• “You really think you’re a good leader? I don’t.”

IRC chats

IRC networks are still here. Grab an IRC client, connect to Undernet or whatever network you like. Fewer people, but not gone.

forums

You’re talking on one!

flash games (maybe not, with security concerns…)

You can probably run Flash stuff — I had some difficulty the last time I tried getting old Flash stuff running on Linux — but frankly, I’d rather run open stuff like HTML5’s Canvas and Javascript. It was one company’s attempt to establish a proprietary platform on the Web for multimedia. I’m really not sad to see it vanish into the past.

video sites that didn’t suck absolute ass like Corptube

I think that YouTube in 2025 is substantially better than the streaming video situation in 2003, but there are YouTube alternatives available today.

https://eonvpn.com/blog/youtube-alternative/

That includes the Fediverse’s PeerTube. I’m skeptical that the numbers are going to work out there for it to scale up due to bandwidth costs of video, but if you like the Threadiverse, it’s probably the closest video analog.

Also on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just so happened to call on the Trump administration to loosen restrictions on the sale of AI infrastructure outside the US.

“We need to accelerate the diffusion of American AI technology around the world,” Huang said in a press briefing. “The policies and encouragement from the administration really need to support that.”

Not to say that Trump’s tariff policy isn’t an issue, but I’d say that you’re leveraging your monopoly position to keep supply down even in the US, Nvidia.

Show me the price/capability gap between “AI-oriented” and “gaming oriented” hardware vanishing, where a small increase in on-board VRAM that has a limited impact on your production costs doesn’t lead to enormous increases in what you’re charging, and then I’d be more convinced that you’re in dire need of more market to serve.

My experience has been that it depends greatly on whether you’re bringing people with you that you want to hang out with all day.

https://www.amazon.com/Stevenson-Entertainment-Group-Apprentice-Collectible/dp/B0002UADAK

BRING HOME THE LEGEND: Consistently overcoming the odds, Donald Trumps’ name has come to define the meaning of success. Now fans and collectors can bring home the legend as this officially licensed 12-inch collectible figure.

17 AUTHENTIC QUOTES: The Donald Trump figure “speaks” 17 inspirational quotes, including his classic line, “You’re fired”.

Also, looking through the reviews:

My granddaughter’s Barbie would have had a new friend, but it did not talk. Returning this doll. Cute idea though.Returning the first one. AMAZON sent me a new one. IT DOES NOT TALK😡😡I am MAD!!😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

I’m now imagining some little girl being given a Barbie and a talking Donald Trump doll for her to role-play domestic scenarios with during her formative years.

American kids might “have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,”

Operating on the assumption that most households aren’t buying their kids 30 dolls (and those that do are probably going to be under the least economic pressure to cut spending), if American households actually cut spending on their kids by a proportional 93% of whatever they were going to spend, I expect that midterms are going to be interesting.

It was fun, everyone was out on the streets, kids were playing and laughing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_power_outage

On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 CEST (11:33 WEST; 10:33 UTC), a major power cut occurred across the Iberian Peninsula affecting mainland Portugal and Peninsular Spain, where electric power was interrupted for about ten hours in most of the Peninsula and longer in some areas.

Ten hours isn’t a huge deal unless you’re maybe in an elevator or train or something where you get trapped.

But if it goes up to multiple days, things like availability of water or ability to receive communications become increasingly-important.

And while it didn’t happen here, sometimes the reason that power is out is because of a larger disaster. Maybe a wildfire or earthquake or whatever. And a lost of power can make responding to problems that that creates a bigger problem.

Also, we’re switching from ICE vehicles to EVs, and while the up side is that that means that a lot of people probably have a much bigger-than-in-an-ICE vehicle battery handy that they can power small devices from for a while, it also means that without grid power, more transportation infrastructure goes down. Someone in this thread mentioned the postal service. I don’t know whether the USPS can generally operate without electricity (lighting in mail rooms? Automated sorting machines? Mail transport via airplanes? Maybe at reduced capacity…), but they’re migrating to battery electric vehicles, and with those, I don’t know what kind of mail service they could provide if the electrical grid is out.

Well, I suppose it depends on what people are out for. Like I said, if it’s death that they’re interested in, then, yeah, it would. But if they’re okay with the crashes without the death, then I’d think that it’d be okay.

You can provide a link if you want too. That is not one.

In all seriousness, I think that there might be a good argument, in 2025, for converting races, be they car or boat or whatnot, to be remotely-driven.

We’ve got the technology today.

It’d permit for higher speeds and suchlike, and eliminate some requirements.

The audience doesn’t get the drama of the driver maybe being killed in an accident, but by-and-large, blood sport has faded into history.

There are clearly some people who watch racing for the crashes — but it’s possible to have the crashes and have vehicles potentially destroyed without the drivers being killed too.

From other comments, I think that OP is after something where they don’t have to install the OS on, from a “just works” standpoint.

I don’t want an OEM-installed OS, since I very much don’t want any OEM customization and the easiest way to ensure that it’s not there is to install a vanilla copy of the OS myself, but some people do want an “unbox it, open the lid, OS is there” experience.

Some Thinkpads have had a Linux option, but I don’t think that Elitebooks have shipped with a pre-installed Linux distro.

goes to look at HP’s site

They don’t seem to currently be shipping any models that do this, based on the “Operating System” election in the left-hand bar.

except for the BT/WiFi module. It’s kinda dogshit.

You can get external USB ones of those, which opens things up. Downside is that it’s another thing to carry, and you gotta plug it in when you sit down. Upside is that it lets you put the antenna wherever you want (which doesn’t matter much for Bluetooth, but can be nice for WiFi). Desktops these days with integrated BT/WiFi tend to have external antennas that you can place where you want, but laptops don’t have that option outside of USB.

That being said, I’ve gotten several exotic USB WiFi adapters for which I needed to compile in support; support wasn’t packaged and in the base kernel. So given the context of the “just works” standpoint, that could be a tripping spot.

Me too, and have done it in the past on one laptop that I did get with Linux when there was no bring-your-own option, but I suppose that OP’s got a point — there are people out there for whom installing the OS on a blank laptop is going to be intimidating.

If you’ve installed an OS a zillion times, this is all old hat. If you never have before, probably feels kind of scary.

For those people, having a preinstalled OS can be a significant value-add.

If true, then parent should not have a problem providing a source supporting their broad claim. Parent claimed “Almost every major corporation wanted Trump and heavily lobbied for him to get in. News outlets, grocery chains, retail stores, tech companies, every large corporation wanted this.”

EDIT: I’ll add that I think that there are probably pretty good reasons for this not to, in fact, be true. It would be quite unexpected for all industry to support one candidate; normally, there is a split, with donations from, say, the finance industry tending to benefit Democrats in recent years. Trump’s 2024 campaign, unlike his 2016 campaign, had quite poor financial support, falling far behind Harris in political donations; Trump’s weakness there was why Musk was in a position to bail Trump out with his colossal expenditure. In recent years, the number of major news outlets that are viewed by Republicans have been quite concentrated into a few sources, especially Fox; Democrats have consumed a broader range of news media; and one wouldn’t normally expect news media primarily consumed by Democrats to be supporting Trump.

But, hey, I’m willing to see the parent’s source material if they have it.

Source?

I’m confused.

First, from the article, my understanding is that Google is talking about providing support for their LLM model on Apple’s iOS phones (I assume via querying an off-phone server, rather than locally). This would mean that iOS users have the ability to use Google’s LLM model, Gemini, instead of just ChatGPT being available.

The Pixel is an Android phone sold by Google. This isn’t the hardware or OS being discussed, and I assume that if you have a Pixel phone, you already have the ability to use Gemini.

Second, I don’t see why someone would take issue. I mean, I can see not wanting to use the thing. I don’t use Google’s off-device speech recognition, because I don’t want to send snippits of my voice to Google. I don’t use their LLM functionality. I think that there are all sorts of apps, like location-sharing things, that it is a bad idea to install. But it’s not like Google providing support on the platform would force you to use the thing.

Third, it sounds like you can use Gemini on grapheneOS. If you object to use of a platform that can make use of Gemini, grapheneOS isn’t going to get you there.

They’ve had an actual (small) war before over Kashmir, subsequent to them both getting nuclear weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War

They did not use their nuclear weapons.

It also marks one of only two instances of conventional warfare between nuclear-armed states (alongside the Sino-Soviet border conflict).

“Trump was right about everything” hats, now with papal infallibility!

Hmm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station

The long-wave frequency used was 200 kilohertz (frequently referred to by the wavelength, 1,500 metres) until 1 February 1988[13] when it was changed to 198 kilohertz, and the power is currently 500 kilowatts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longwave_radio_broadcasters

According to this, there are only three other longwave transmitting stations in the world at least as high-power as this station: one in each of Morocco, Algeria, and Poland. So I guess that it’s a pretty esoteric sort of hardware.